AtomVM Daily: Performance Gains and Hardware Expansion
AtomVM merged USB CDC port drivers for three embedded platforms while opening pull requests to optimize scheduler performance and improve JIT compiler architecture. The focus appears to be on expanding hardware support and eliminating performance bottlenecks.
Duration: PT1M58S
Transcript
Good morning, this is AtomVM Daily for June 4th, 2026.
Yesterday's activity centers on two key improvements: expanding embedded hardware capabilities and optimizing runtime performance. The team merged USB CDC port drivers for ESP32, RP2, and STM32 platforms in pull request 2301, while opening performance-focused changes targeting the scheduler and JIT compiler.
The USB CDC driver work represents significant progress on hardware connectivity. This merged pull request adds serial communication capabilities across three major embedded platforms, building on previous work tracked in issues 2125 and 2269. For developers working on embedded projects, this means standardized USB communication is now available across the ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, and STM32 ecosystems.
On the performance front, two optimization efforts are underway. Pull request 2329 addresses scheduler inefficiency in SMP mode, where message passing between processes was triggering unnecessary cross-thread operations. The description indicates this was causing performance degradation in common send-receive patterns, where processes would bounce between schedulers instead of running locally. Meanwhile, pull request 2328 targets the JIT compiler architecture, factoring out shared native register bookkeeping across multiple ARM architectures including AArch64, ARM32, and ARMv6M.
The team also bumped macOS CI workflow timeouts in pull request 2327, suggesting either increased test complexity or platform-specific build performance issues.
What's next: The scheduler optimization could significantly improve message-passing performance for applications running on multi-core systems. The JIT refactoring should make the compiler more maintainable across ARM variants while potentially enabling future optimization work.
That's your AtomVM update for today.